Day At The Library

May 21, 2012, Library, Dream Team

The objective:

The Dream Team went to the Library to the fifth floor to the curriculum room. We were there to pick out 8 books/items that would be useful to the children in this project and from there pick out 3 of our best books to bring back to the classroom to discuss further.


The activity:

The first thing we did was look around the curriculum room for any games, sets, or puppets that could be useful for our children. We found a set with two lion puppets and a huge book that you can draw on with dry erase markers. This book had the story, "Lion's Birthday Party" and pages with empty boxes that the children can create their own stories. If the set was not as large we would have taken it back as one of our three items. We thought that maybe the children can make up their own story and then act it out as the lion with the puppets so they can us their imaginations.

We then went straight to the computers and learned our library resources that we had and found books that we thought would be interesting. There were a few books that we decided as a group would want in our classroom but were not available at the University Park Library so we ordered them from the other campus libraries.

We searched for more books that would be useful for the children in the classroom on this project and went out and picked them from the stacks. We discussed as a group whether or not they would be beneficial for our use. We had picked a bunch of books of the shelves that were on African animals but not specifically lions they we voted that we not pick those books. We found a few dvds and cds that might have been useful to what we wanted.

The results:

We brought back two books with us to the classroom and are waiting for the books to come in that we ordered to the library. We chose the story of Christian the Lion that tells the story about two men who raised a pet lion, how they raised him, what he ate, how he made friends, etc. The two men had to free Christian back into the wild when he got too big for them to handle. They went back to Arica to find him and reconnect with Christian. Despite what everyone said that Christian would not remember them, he did and they reconnected. There is a Youtube video that explains this story that we thought we can play to the kids along with reading the books. We also thought that we can ask some good impromptu questions to this book and video.

The aftermath:

When we got back to the classroom the class reflected on how we did in the library and what we found.

Library
-Call #s were difficult to look up
-There were an abundant amount of resources that we were not aware of
-The system, CAT, was very helpful to our search of books so we did not have to wonder to search randomly for books.

Lions
-They were hard to find on their own without other jungle/African animals
-There was a range of representations of lions from fierce to cuddly depending on what book you were reading.

Learning
-Every group member was talking to each other and drawing on each other knowledge as well as drawing off their prior knowledge.

Representation
-fierce
-sleek
-smart
-scary
-proud
-predatory
-furry
-predatory
-fast
-protective
-dangerous
-talented
-friendly
-social
-changing
-endangered
-fearless
-ferocious
-hunters
-respected
-majestic

We then were instructed to make a pose of the different adjectives as well as make a structure of the word majestic. Some of us struggled with this idea of representing our bodies as a one specific adjective. We stated that "We did not think of ourselves as majestic so it was difficult to pose as so."

We left the classroom with many questions such as:
-If it was difficult for us to represent something then how will we make it possible for our students to represent the lion or object that we want them to?
-How can we use this activity along with our books we brought back to our classroom to teach our students in the most beneficial, creative way?